https://doi.org/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-025-00386-7
Research
Quantum grey-scale image encryption method based on alternating quantum random walk
1
School of Railway Intelligent Engineering, Dalian Jiaotong University, Dalian, Liaoning, China
2
Bank of Beijing Financial Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, China
Received:
5
April
2025
Accepted:
17
June
2025
Published online:
1
July
2025
In recent years, in the context of the rapid development of quantum computing technology, quantum attack methods such as Shor’s algorithm pose a serious threat to the traditional public key encryption system based on number-theoretic puzzles. Using the characteristics of quantum bits, this paper proposes a quantum grey-scale image encryption method based on alternating quantum random walk. Firstly, the quantum representation model is used to transform the image into a quantum state, and then the quantum key is generated by the alternating quantum random walk algorithm, and combined with the quantum gate operation for encrypting the grey-scale image data, which not only inherits the advantage of the anti-attack of the quantum computation, but also, through the quantum parallelism and the non-clonability, which solves the security and efficiency bottleneck of traditional image encryption in the quantum era and significantly improves the security of grey-scale image encryption. The algorithm proposed in this paper has been verified by simulation experiments, and the experimental results show that the method is excellent in encryption and decryption effects, and for the encrypted image, a number of performance analyses have been carried out, and the analysis results show that the proposed encryption method has a high degree of security, and it can effectively resist the statistical attack, noise attack, etc., and the distribution of the histogram of encrypted image is more uniform, the pixel correlation analysis is close to 1, and the information entropy is close to 7.999.
Key words: Quantum random walk / Quantum representation model / Quantum key / Image encryption
© The Author(s) 2025
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